If you're in the Onehunga and Mangere Bridge areas in Auckland, wondering why your internet connection is down (and as a consequence, unable to read this), wonder no more: you're one of around 3000 customers who have been disconnected.
The culprits seem to be unnamed vandals. Chorus confirmed to interest.co.nz that there is an outage currently.
"The team has found that the Chorus cables supplying broadband service to the Onehunga and Mangere Bridge areas have been damaged due to public vandalism," a Chorus spokesperson said.
"Around 3000 fibre customers have been impacted and there's been minor impact on our copper services with around 9 connections cut," the spokesperson said.
Chorus apologised for the inconvenience to the affected customers caused by the outage, which appears to have started Monday morning with service expected to be restored by tomorrow Wednesday.
Posters on a local Facebook group suggested children had cut the cables on the Onehunga side of Mangere Bridge, but this is unverified.
Chorus has technicians working around the clock to repair the vandalised cable.
Update: Chorus clarified that the number of cut connections are just nine and not 110, and said service is expected to be restored by tomorrow.
Update Sept 3 17:13
Chorus has provided another progress report on the restoration effort:
- Currently there are 4 business connections and 2282 residential connections affected by the outage.
- In order to ensure the quality of the repair, around 1km of fibre will be blown.
- Work will be continuous until all services restored.
- Repairs have been difficult, due to the restricted space under the bridge and the number of fibres that were damaged and needed to be repaired.
- We [Chorus] have multiple crews working 24/7 on multiple cables at once and can see services being restored as the fibres are connected.
- Obviously we are really disappointed that the actions of a few have led to inconvenience for so many and apologise to all who have been affected.
- We are grateful for the dedication of our teams who are working through the night to get people back online as soon as possible.
- We are expecting all services to be restored by tomorrow afternoon.
Update Sept 4
Chorus said its crews have worked through the night and as at 1am there were 330 customers remaining offline; full restoration of service is expected around midday.
The network builder is also considering security options for the site. It will have security personnel on site for the time being.
Meanwhile, police are investigating the incident.
The outage appears to have been more widespread than initially thought, with links to the West Coast going to the Mt Eden exchange taking the Mangere Bridge path. Asked about this, the Chorus spokesperson said: "mainly it was Mangere Bridge and Onehunga affected but because some transport links were cut, there were outages elsewhere."
Update Sept 4, 11.50 Fibre services have now been restored by the Chorus crews, with a plan in place to sort out the few copper connections affected. Security is in place for the site as well, Chorus said.
12 Comments
The fact that infrastructure that is relied upon by about 20,000 households can be taken down by a simple act of vandalism (not requiring heavy machinery or a large amount of time / effort) is a bit of a joke. The fact there's no redundancy in the system to not get things back up and running within hours is pretty piss-poor.
Oh, undoubtedly. My point was more that if there's a suburb that can be cut off from the internet for multiple days by something smaller than an excavator or a four-alarm fire, then that infrastructure should be heavily protected or given redundancy so that a breach doesn't bring the area down.
I mean I'm sure anyone determined could bring chunks of the network down with a bit of forethought and heavy equipment, but some crack-head with a hacksaw or a machete shouldn't be able to do that.
The scary thing is that the pylon incident in Northland a couple of months back..... If you spend a few hours looking over the power grid in NZ, it's obvious that perhaps 5-10 people each with a cordless impact wrench could, if coordinated, bring down the entire national grid within five minutes such that it would be out of action for several days.
The internet is - by design - a network where a the loss of a single node does not mean the whole network goes out as traffic is re-routed through other nodes.
At the edges of the network however - between a core node and user endpoints - aka 'the last mile' - there are single points of failure.
In a high quality network, network designers ensure very few user endpoints are affected by an edge node failure. But if the network designers are forced to cut quality to save money the numbers can rise dramatically.
When the exact number of affected users is established - we'll be able to tell the quality. (One hopes we're not in the banana republic level of quality.)
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